zombies... as a metaphor?

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2005)

On the surface it is an overly violent zombie movie. On a deeper level however, it is a brilliant metaphor with every character representing an emotion. The ideas of emotion in regards to language and identity are portrayed here in the clearest sense I have ever experienced in pop culture media. The message of 28 Days Later is not that zombies are bad, but how we can lose our identities in everyday life.
Jim, who is the personification of hope for the survival of our right to Be, goes on to meet the rest of the very small cast: Mark and Selena, two survivors that are in his same situation. Selena represents doubt and pessimism, and Mark represents a sense of impending mortality. They next meet Frank and Hannah, a father and daughter barricaded in their apartment. Frank represents mature fatherly protection of his daughter's life, and Hannah is a sort of misguided teenage angst. They hear a radio broadcast from the military, that they drive out to investigate. What they find is a handful of soldiers who all represent our most basic human will to survive at all costs, including the need to procreate. The zombies however are the clearest representation of rage, and mob mentality. Both these emotions are about the fear of the loss of our identity.
Throughout the film, the zombies are always called 'the infected' and the infection is only called 'rage'. It is the purest sense of hatred and a desire to destroy anything other than their own kind. The movie begins with a scene of animal rights activists breaking into a lab where a monkey is strapped down, with its eyes forced open, being made to watch images of rioting, racism, hatred, and chaos on monitors that surround him. In freeing the monkeys from the torture of the experiment, the activists unknowingly unleash the infection. The one spoken line by an infected person is when Jim is forced to kill a little boy. He has the child pinned on the ground with his foot, and is standing over him with a baseball bat. Through the guttural wheezing and sputtering, the boy looks up at him and says 'I hate you'. It is as if even if the infected had language and separate identity, they would only use it to hate and destroy. Jim is forced to kill him because the infection had dissolved the boy's essential human nature. As a foil to that, when Frank gets a drop of blood in his eye, just before the infection takes over, he looks at his daughter and says ' Hannah, I love you very much'.
Each character in the movie has a name and personality. They each play their own role, separate from one another. The director, Danny Boyle, makes a truly brilliant distinction between the person, and people. The person is smart, sustainable, kind, and helpful. However, when it gets to be more than one person, especially in a mob environment, those qualities are lost, and traded in for the good of the group, a sense of not being a singular person anymore, and fear. The zombies are not people who happen to not be thinking straight. They are a writhing mass with no language, and no identity.